ProtegisParts review for BSS: B2B & Wholesale Solution

Aug. 18, 2023

[UPDATE] While B2B has obviously taken great strides to address my previously reported issues, they are still missing the mark, especially regarding communication. B2B has begun sending out weekly updates to note the changes ALREADY made within the past week, but unfortunately all communication is still reactive, rather than proactive and there is no acknowledgement of basic change management practices. Ideally, we would love to be notified before new enhancements are put in production and given the chance to test with a test environment or at least update our own code to match. Instead, we are notified after-the-fact and in such general terms that we don’t always know the exact changes that were made. For example, there was a recent update to the API response received upon failure to update a price rule. The layout of the JSON response was so different from the previous responses that our process posting the updates could no longer recognize failures. This change resulted in hundreds of price rule updates failing without retries or notifications. End result: our catalog pricing is completely off and must be diffed back in. This has resulted in the lost of not only orders, but a partnership that was under discussion. All things considered, I am rather surprised that this is such a highly-recommended solution in the Shopify App store. --previous-- On the surface, it looks like a really good tool, but our experience has not been stellar. In the end, better communication and follow up would be a very helpful. Here is a rundown on the issues we have/are encountering: - The B2B/Wholesale team updates the app with no advanced notice and no release notes. Which wouldn’t be a big problem except that recently most updates have included changes that break the solution. This has resulted in a wide range of issues including - but not limited to - inaccurate pricing, inconsistent pricing, no pricing, and in the most recent incident – selling all items on the site for $5 each. Without advance notice we cannot even plan to test or be on alert for potential issues, which leaves us at the mercy of the customer reporting issues. - Additionally app updates have – more than once – overwritten our custom code in various places on the site, resulting in inaccurate/incomplete information displayed to the customer. We have had to rollback or modify their changes several times to correct introduced bugs. - We have two outstanding issues at present where: o Liquid code contains multiple price rules for same item (only one rule defined) – customers may see either price (seems to be selected at random) o In rare circumstances, the prices displayed to customer change when either added to the cart, or during the checkout process. - Updates have been pushed to the API without warning and without documentation which changed how the API responds to calls, resulting – in one instance – in the creation of thousands of duplicate price records. The API online documentation has still not been updated to reflect these changes, though we did get them to rollback (or at least change again) the issue that caused the duplicate price records. - We have submitted many tickets to customer support. While we have had great support on some tickets, others have been very poorly handled – in one instance our ticket was merged with a ticket from an entirely different customer and we started getting copied on that customer’s ticket updates, and we believe they were receiving our updates on the same issue including screenshots and documentation. In another instance our ticket was “merged with another ticket” and we never received another update; those updates are probably going to someone else. Overall, need better release testing, communciation and overall process control while improving helpdesk ticket management and follow up.